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Archive for ‘Social Media Marketing’

Thanks to a recent study of over 1,000 marketing executives, digital agency Leadtail has published their insights into how current heads-of-marketing are changing their use of social media. Among other things, the study looks at the most-shared, mainstream, industry, and social sources, along with the brands and people who are most likely to be influencers of CMOs. It’s clear that the digital marketing landscape is changing. Here are few trends that caught my eye:

1. Facebook content isn’t as sharable as you think. When it comes to cross-platform content sharing, Facebook lags far behind its top competitors. In other words, content found on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram are (at least) twice as likely to be shared on Twitter, than content found on Facebook. Marketing executives’ sharing of LinkedIn content on Twitter is up by 200%, so if you want to get noticed, you better step up your game on LinkedIn because CMOs are consuming and sharing that content.

2. (Visual) content is king. If you want a marketing executive to share your content, you better make it visual because this study found that pieces of content that had a visual component were more likely to be shared. I would argue that this isn’t just for CMOs; much of our own content is more shareable if it’s visual. See for yourself – head over to analytics.twitter.com and look for your tweets with the most engagements. Mine are always images, with very few exceptions.

3. Location-based social networks are dead. Only 5% of marketing execs check-in (down from almost 30% from 2 years ago). Remember Foursquare? Yeah, nobody does. Three years ago I stopped checking-in on Foursquare. Before that, I was a consistent user checking in to the bus station, bus route, different buildings on campus, and even different carafes at Starbucks (Yes, the jugs they hold the different types of coffee in). I finally felt that all this checking-in was feeling like a chore and had little or no reward attached to it, so I stopped. I imagine others felt the same way.

For the cost of your contact details, you can download the full report from their website. It’s a great piece of content marketing about content marketing.

Everybody works for a brand. It could be Big Blue or your own one-person business. Often I see articles, white papers, and case studies about how to “get” more customers. That’s the most important part, right? Maybe not. Yes, customer acquisition is essential, but what about those customers you already have – how do we know what they are feeling towards our brand? Are they loyal, or do we have a churn problem? Working at a post-secondary institution, we talk about this all the time; the importance of keeping students in the classroom. Retention.

The same concern exists with our social media and email marketing campaigns. We have all had people unsubscribe from our mailing lists and unfollow our Twitter accounts, but we often have very little insight as to why. The good folks at Buzzsteam and Fractl recently surveyed 900 people to understand why people unfollow brands. The handy infographic below shares some of their findings. Here are three key take-aways that caught my eye:

Content is still king. According to this survey, the biggest reason why people unfollow brands on social networks is due to boring or repetitive content. If your brand sells shoes, you can no longer think of yourselves as just a shoe company; you are also a media publishing conglomerate specializing in industry-specific usefulcontent. Not just price promotions. You write, produce, and distribute articles, case studies, stories, videos, images, audio, etc. Is Red Bull an energy drink or a media house?

More is not the answer. The most referenced reason why people unsubscribe to email mailing lists is the brand sends messages too frequently. This also holds true in social media as “too frequent content” was noted as the second-most popular reason for a user to unfollow on social. One email a week from a brand I follow is about all I can stomach.

Engagement is the expectation. Almost 40% of the respondents indicated that they think brands are quite or very likely to engage with them after they follow the brand’s Facebook page. To me, serving content to my news feed isn’t engagement. If a brand reaches out to me personally or responds to my comments, that’s engagement. The expectation that I would be “engaged” simply by liking a Facebook page doesn’t exist in my mind.

I also find it interesting that about half of the respondents said that they would never unfollow a brand on LinkedIn. There seems to be some social network hierarchy going on here. Perhaps a LinkedIn follower would be considered more “valuable” than one from Facebook or Twitter. I’ll look for more reading on this topic.

What do you think? Do you unfollow brands because of their behaviour on social media? Are there other reasons not listed here that make you disengage? Let me know!

The day this blog post was published, January 15, 2015, would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s 86th birthday. Each year, Americans observe a national holiday on the third Monday of January to recognize Dr. King and the American Civil Rights Movement.

Marketers, PR folks, and advertisers are always looking for ways to get their message in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Often, this means trying to piggyback on an existing major event, celebration, or holiday. A great example of this was Oreo’s famous “You can still dunk in the dark” tweet sent during the power outage at Super Bowl 47. It was clever, timely, and a bit funny as it made light of an awkward situation. The Super Bowl blackout had nothing to do with cookies, but after this tweet, it did.

MarCom professionals can run into challenges when they apply this strategy to events with a very serious nature: Remembrance Day (Common Wealth Nations), Veterans Day (US), Martin Luther King Jr. Day, etc. Brands run the risk of looking too opportunistic as they try to cash in on the importance and sacrifice of others.

Last January, several public figures and brands made questionable (to put it nicely) social media posts trying to cash-in on the popularity of the #MLKday hashtag used to recognize Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Reviewing a few of these missteps from last year has led me to three key thoughts on the subject.

The tone of your message should match the spirit of the observance

As a brand, you should seek to create and share content that serves to match and even enhance, the serious nature of the holiday. A few examples from last year that missed the mark:

2. The infamous “Freedom to Twerk” event that was planned for the good folks in Flint, Michigan drew attention to itself after the promoters Photoshopped Dr. King’s head onto a body of a Man wearing a gold watch, chain, and medallion while making what appears to be a “west side” hand gesture. After this poster gained notoriety, the party was eventually cancelled. Several people weighed in on the issue, including MLK’s daughter, Dr. Bernice King, who was appalled by the poster.

3. Sarah Palin’s tasteless political grandstanding starts with quoting Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech, and concludes with her telling President Obama “no more playing the race card.” Yikes.

You may not be as funny as you think

Humour is tough. Attempts at humour during otherwise serious situations may be interpreted as your brand’s attempt to make fun of, or devalue the purpose of, the event.

1. This misguided tweet from Nyquil reads like a joke that didn’t quite hit the mark.

2 & 3. Two other notable attempts at humour came from the Chive, and a pornographic website. In both instances they used humour in a way that some would consider distasteful, but considering that the source of these jokes were the Chive and a pornographic website, they pretty much lived up to expectations. Instead of posting these attempts at humour on davidhallsocialmedia.com, I’ll let you google those two tweets yourself.

Don’t make a big stretch to connect your brand with the event

This is obvious self-promotion. It looks insensitive, self-interested, and opportunistic. If you are going to run an MLK Day promotion, make sure it makes sense within the context of the observance. Be aware of the nuanced difference between an event designed to celebrate as opposed to one dedicated to recognize something. What the heck do potato stamps, cereal, apples, diapers, or a day at the salon getting pampered have to do with the civil rights movement?

This Pampers Facebook promotion is particularly cringe-worthy because (as a current diaper customer) I can tell you that 10 rewards points is what you get for buying about $5 worth of baby bum wipes. They almost couldn’t have offered less.

For any organization thinking about joining the #MLKday trending topic this weekend, I encourage you to focus on respect, not referrals; honour, not sales; legacy, not leads; person to person, not business to business; and to make sure your content reflects the nature and tone of the observance. Without question, Dr. King serves as a hero to millions of people around the globe, and is absolutely a hero of mine.

The good folks at MultiVisionDigital published the infographic below to put into perspective how the omnipresent video is affecting consumer decision-making and behaviour. If you are trying to sell products or services, you may want to add video to your online strategy (if it isn’t there already) as consumers are 64% more likely to purchase a product after watching an online video.

The infographic also shows that video is not just used for traditional B2C decision-making, but executives are using videos to inform their B2B purchasing choices.

The average user spends 88% more time on a website with video

60% of consumers will spend at least 2 minutes watching a video that educates them about a product they plan on purchasing.

96% of IT decision makers and tech buyers watch videos for business

75% of executives watch work-related videos on business websites once a week

What do you think? Do online videos impact your decision-making? When was the last time you made a medium-sized or large purchase without checking out YouTube to see the product in action? Leave a comment and let me know.

How often do you think about what you are telling the world about yourself when you post an update to your social media profiles? Well, it turns out that you are being studied, whether you know it or not. Earlier this fall, PLOSone published a study that aimed to link the vocabulary netizens use with their age, gender, and select personality traits. The unique twist on this study was the methodology. Instead of using known word correlations to base their analysis on, they adopted an open vocabulary approach in an attempt to “find connections that are not captured with traditional closed-vocabulary word-category analyses”.

The use of the open vocabulary approach yielded some interesting results:

1. Men are much more likely to use profanity and talk about gaming while women seem to be much more positive and upbeat. *The size of the word in the word clouds below indicates the strength of the correlation; color indicates relative frequency of usage. Underscores (_) connect words of multi-word phrases.

2. Your age can be determined based on whether you talk about school, work or family.

3. Extroverts like to party, introverts like the internet, neurotics use angry and depressed language, and the emotional stable like….basketball?

4. Finally, the people in your social media networks who’s updates are negative, profanity-filled, and often tiresome, may rank low on the agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness scale.

It’s almost upon us again. That’s right, Black Friday. When our American friends line up for some great holiday deals on the day following turkey and football day. And it’s a big deal. Some wait in line all night for the stores to open to get one-day-deals of around 60%-80% off, even on big ticket items.

If it’s a big deal in real life, it’s a big deal online. Just take a look at the #BlackFriday hashtag. It is filled with tweets of excitement and plenty of businesses trying to get the word out about their great deals. And the tweets keep mounting up. When I took the screenshot below from hashtags.org on November 21, 2012, it clearly showed the sheer amount of Black Friday related tweets going through the roof.

Twitter will be a great source of information this weekend, but the one social network I’m most interested in for Black Friday is Foursquare. Will a Black Friday badge be available? Who will be the most popular retailers? Who’s offering discounts and sales to people who check-in at their store? I couldn’t find many answers online, or through my own Foursquare app (perhaps because I’m in Canada). To be quite honest, the lack of Foursquare specials in my city has led me to stray away from that social network altogether.

But Foursquare has been very popular in the past. Check out the infographic below released by Foursquare that outlines last year’s activity on the network. It shows that Black Friday is the day that sees the greatest number of check-ins at retail outlets. It also suggests that people start arriving at their shopping destinations around midnight of the day before to either stake out their spot in line or to participate in Black Friday Midnight Madness events.

I would like to ask my American readers if they can add some first-person accounts from the Black Friday social media front. Will you be looking for deals using apps or social media sites? Is Foursquare part of your game plan? What hashtags do you find the most value in? If you are a business owner or retailer, will you be offering any incentives to your social media audience? Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving!